Marrying the Earth to the Building

CAST

ABOUT DIDI CONTRACTOR

Didi Contractor was born in 1929 in America. Her German father, Edmund Kinzinger, and American mother, Alice Fish Kinzinger, were both Expressionist painters, associated with Bauhaus group of the 1920s. Although she always felt drawn towards architecture, she studied art. As a young woman coming to adulthood in the middle of the twentieth century, she was not encouraged to study architecture.

In 1951, she met a young man from India and fell in love with him. They married and Didi Contractor happily set out to begin a new life in distant India with her husband, Narayan Contractor, a Hindu student of civil engineering. They raised a family and Didi immersed herself in her new home and its cultural patterns, turning her training in art to design and architecture.

INTERVIEWEES

Monisha Mukundan * Writer

Monishas House

Dr. Barbara Nath-Wiser * Director of Nishta Health Clinic

Nishta Health Clinic built in 1995

Chitra Vishwanath * Architect

Jugal Kishore Sankhyan * Potter

Ruud Kooloos * Architecture Student

Construction Site

Deepa Bhushan * Lawyer and Member of the Governing body of the Sambhaavnaa Institute